A siren blares. Feet crunch on gravel. A county sheriff looks into a car and tells a teenage girl he knows she is pregnant. He arrests her father for driving her to a state where she can get an abortion. “And you, young lady,” the sheriff says, “well, you’re under arrest for evading motherhood.”
This is an advert from the Lincoln Project, a pro-democracy group, presenting a dark vision of the future for millions of American women if Donald Trump defeats Kamala Harris in the presidential election and criminalises abortion nationwide.
But its target audience includes another crucial group of voters: conservative men.
“Dobbs Dads” – named after the supreme court’s Dobbs decision, which in 2022 ended the constitutional right to abortion – are suburban gen X and millennial fathers angered by the prospect of “big government” making choices for their wives’ and daughters’ reproductive healthcare needs.
The group has been identified as crucial by the Lincoln Project’s sister organisation, the Lincoln Democracy Institute, along with “Red Dawn conservatives” – inspired by the 1984 film Red Dawn, in which American teenagers fight invading Soviet forces – who value a strong national defence and traditional alliances.
It is the latest attempt to find a snappy shorthand to describe the type of voters whose decisions are set to affect the whole of America and the world. That is because, in the absence of a national popular vote, the result of the presidential election is likely to come down to just tens of thousands of votes in seven swing states.
The first iteration was “soccer moms” backing the Democrat Bill Clinton against the Republican Bob Dole in 1996. But after the terrorist attacks on New York and Washington on 11 September 2001, the then senator Joe Biden opined that “soccer moms are security moms now” as the Republican George W Bush sought re-election.
Later elections delivered the “Starbucks mom”, “waitress mom” and “Walmart mom”, labels generally applied to suburban white women facing economic struggles. Then there “Nascar dads” – referring to mostly white, middle-aged, working-class or lower-middle-class men – and “mama bears”, conservative mothers and grandmothers who in recent years have organised for parental rights.
Now America faces another close election. The latest swing state surveys by Emerson College Polling and the Hill found Harris had a slight edge over Trump in Michigan, Georgia and Nevada and the candidates tied in Pennsylvania. Trump was narrowly ahead in Wisconsin, North Carolina and Arizona.
That the Dobbs decision, which overturned half a century of legal precedent protecting the right to abortion under Roe v Wade, already galvanised progressive female voters in the 2022 midterm elections is no secret. But the Lincoln Democracy Institute believes that conservative men could also be crucial.
Trygve Olson, a senior adviser at the Lincoln Democracy Institute, said: “The Dobbs dads tend to be millennial. They are more likely to be college-educated white males and they’re disproportionately girl dads. Some of them are pro-life; they’re conservatives. Their conservatism is grounded in, ‘I don’t want government telling me what to do.’”
Olson characterised the thinking of many such voters as: “I would hope my daughter’s never having to face that choice but, if they were, I don’t want some theocrat or government official making that decision. I would hope that my daughter would come to me. I’m trying to raise her with integrity. I view my role as protector. I don’t want government making that decision any more than I want the government telling me what I can grow on my land or what kind of shotgun I can own.”
The “State Line” ad, warning of a national abortion ban under Project 2025, a radical policy blueprint from a rightwing thinktank, racked up half a million views on YouTube in two days. Olson, who grew up in the battleground state of Wisconsin, continued: “Being a girl dad kind of changes your perspective because you can empathise with a lot of things they go through.
“As I say to my 15-year-old, I can empathise with some of the challenges you have and I can relate to them, but I don’t know what it’s like to be a 15-year-old girl. I’ve never been one. But I do know that I can take what I know and apply it to you and that seems to be happening with these voters. Joe Biden had fallen off with them. A lot of them were undecided. What we’re seeing in the data is Kamala Harris has recaptured a lot. There’s still work to be done.”
Abortion proved a winning issue for Democrats in elections in 2022 and 2023. Sensing the political danger, Trump has sought to assure voters he would not seek a national ban and to distance himself from Project 2025. Olson observed: “You see Trump trying to back away from Dobbs. It’s an understanding that those voters are the ones that are going to decide these key states.”
But Democrats seized on the issue and the theme of “freedom” at their recent convention in Chicago. Among the speakers was Amanda Zurawski, who recalled going into premature labour at 18 weeks of pregnancy but being sent home by a hospital in Texas, which has an almost total abortion ban, because she was deemed not to qualify for an abortion under the law’s exception for life-threatening emergencies.
Standing alongside her on stage, Zurawski’s husband, Josh, told the convention: “I’m here tonight because the fight for reproductive rights isn’t just a woman’s fight. This is about fighting for our families and, as Kamala Harris says, our future.”
Speaking on a Brookings Institution thinktank panel earlier this week, Elaine Kamarck, a former White House official, commented: “Somebody asked me a couple of weeks ago, can you summarise Kamala Harris’s message in one sentence? I said, no, I can’t, I can summarise it in one word, and the word is freedom.
“What is behind that? The Dobbs decision. What’s behind that is the unprecedented decision of the supreme court to take away a half-century-old right from the population, and the population that cares about it most happens to be 55% of the electorate.”
Kamarck added: “What the abortion decision did was way beyond abortion. It was about fundamental freedoms. Can the government come into your bedroom or into your home or into your doctor’s office and make decisions for you? That’s scary. It’s particularly scary to a country, to an electorate, that was built on freedom, so here we had a situation where the Democrats took away from the Republicans an issue that used to work for them.”
The convention also worked hard to present Harris as a viable commander-in-chief in contrast to Trump’s isolationism, chaotic style and past derogatory statements about the former senator John McCain, a prisoner of war in Vietnam, and other military veterans. Olson believes that “Red Dawn conservatives” could also help swing the election.
Olson said: “They tend to be both male and female. They’re gen X or late baby boomers. They’re conservative, came of age during Reagan and Thatcher. About half of them voted for Trump. The other half didn’t vote for Biden; they just kind of sat it out. That said, there are things that can move them.
“Trump saying [Russian leader Vladimir] Putin’s a genius for invading Ukraine – they’re very troubled by that. They’re troubled by the Republican party no longer being that party that understood there was an evil empire, so foreign policy matters to them to a degree.”
Some of the Lincoln Project’s most successful ads in the 2022 midterms targeted “Red Dawn conservatives” in battleground states, focusing on how Trump was siding with Putin against Ukraine. “From an electoral standpoint, it isn’t about probably getting them to vote for Harris as much as it is to get them to disqualify Trump.
“A lot of them will never pull the lever for a Democrat and probably down ballot vote Republican. But the question is Donald Trump, because it’s another thing that makes them uncomfortable with Donald Trump.”
The Republican primary elections showed a small but significant minority refusing to embrace Trump and his “America first” foreign policy. Although she dropped out of the primaries in early March, his rival Nikki Haley, espousing more traditionally hawkish positions, continued to draw up to 20% in the contests.
Harris and Trump have spent the past week travelling in swing states such as Georgia, Michigan and Wisconsin. But with the key electoral battlegrounds ranging from the midwest to the Sun belt, and spanning various demographics of age, gender and race, sorting voters into categories – and finding the right message for the right audience – is complex.
Speaking on a panel organised by the University of Chicago’s Institute of Politics and the Cook Political Report on the sidelines of the Democratic convention, the pollster John Anzalone said: “Where I do think the battleground is is suburban women. What’s key is to break the myth of what suburban women look like.
“One is they’re super diverse. It used to be in 1990 that 85% of suburban women were white. Now it’s 61% or something like that, so it’s diverse. It’s older, which I think is good for Kamala in some ways as well on issue-based stuff. It’s a mix of people who have children, who don’t have children, etc. But why that universe becomes important is that [Hillary] Clinton got 46% of them; Biden got 56% of them.”
Suburban men, Anzalone noted, have edged away from Democrats. “So where are you going to make that up? You can make it up with suburban women, not just because of the abortion issue but because of who Donald Trump is.”
